Like most businesses today you probably rely heavily on digital marketing to attract, win and retain new customers.

You’ll probably have a website, which presents your products, services and unique selling points. You’ll also use other digital tools, such as search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, blogs and social media, to encourage new customers to “reach into” your business and make an enquiry.

Then, with all this in place, you’ll more than likely play the waiting game. The problem is it can be a long wait for customer enquiries, especially when your competitors are playing exactly the same game.

Relying solely on digital marketing, in this way, has 2 major weaknesses.

Lost traffic

The first big area of weakness is lost traffic. There will be many people coming to your website, reading you blogs and social media posts, who are just not ready to do business and so just take no action.

Well, what if there was a way more compelling call to action in your digital media, which would mean more potential customers leave their information with you to follow-up?

Lost leads

Most businesses are great at closing ‘hot’ leads (i.e. potential customers who are ready to buy) generated via digital marketing. The problem is that majority of leads created by digital marketing will not be that ‘hot’. The majority of your digitally generated leads will not quite be ready to buy today.

Before doing business with you, most potential customers want a conversation with you to understand you and to be understood. They want to have relationship building interactions with you before they’re ready to do business. In fact, in our experience it takes, on average, seven contacts before prospective customers are ready to do business with you.

Unfortunately, and for many reasons such as lack of time and a dedicated, skilled resource, most businesses stop their follow-up after a couple of attempts at best and very few businesses take the time to have regular and meaningful conversations with potential customers. This means that, even though you have expended some effort and money, the majority of your digitally generated leads are likely to go and do business with a competitor, or just forget about their need altogether and never do business with anybody.

Well, what if you were able to take a more systematic approach to following up the leads generated by your digital marketing? One that guarantees that when your potential customers are ready to buy, you are in the frame? This is where Consultative Telemarketing comes in.

Consultative Telemarketing

Consultative Telemarketing is a more systematic and telephone-based approach to following up all the leads you generate by digital marketing.

It ensures you make the necessary telephone follow-up contacts (supported by digital contacts) to nurture digitally generated leads or potential customers until they are ready to buy. The result is that a greater percentage of your digitally generated leads are taken all the way through to the finish line, delivering a greater return on your marketing investment.

Furthermore, Consultative Telemarketing can be used to target “high value” potential customers you may never attract through digital marketing alone.

That’s the power of Consultative Telemarketing!

Used with some readily available online tools, it can reduce lost traffic and reduce lost leads. With a few simple steps, you can use Consultative Telemarketing to strengthen your marketing strategy and increase new sales.

But is Consultative Telemarketing really the way to go?

Consultative Telemarketing is a relevant tool for your business, particularly if you sell high-value products and services to other businesses. It can be an easy and effective way to increase your profits and promote your product or service. However, it’s best not to approach it with rose-tinted glasses. While it has many advantages, it also has some disadvantages that you should also consider.

Benefits of using Consultative Telemarketing

The main benefit of using consultative telemarketing to promote your business, particularly to other businesses, is that it enables you to get much closer to your potential customers than digital marketing alone would allow.

You can use Consultative Telemarketing to build initial relationships with potential customers and immediately gauge their level of interest in your product or service. It then allows you to generate “high-value” really ‘hot’ sales opportunities with potential customers, at a time when they are ready to buy and therefore, more likely to convert to real sales. Additionally, it allows you to:

provide a more interactive and engaging sales process for customers

create a great first impression and build immediate rapport with new customers

pre-empt and overcome potential obstacles to making sales to new customers

generate ‘high-quality’ and ‘high-value’ leads and appointments

increase your reach and sales territory without increasing your sales team

sell to both existing and new customers

concentrate your sales team on activities that will have the greatest return for your business, i.e. meeting new customers and making new sales

target and forecast realistic levels of new business growth (for example you will be able to calculate the real cost of each new business leads, the conversion rate of leads to sales and as a result you can build a strategy that will guarantee success as you define it).

Disadvantages of telemarketing

There can be some disadvantages to using Consultative Telemarketing. In particular, you need to consider the following:

telemarketing, that’s not delivered in a “consultative” way, can be resented, particularly by decision makers who receive many sales calls each day

potential customer target lists may not always be clean, up-to-date and checked for “opt-out” against emails or telephone calls and this can leave you with a lot of leg work and a potential risk of falling foul of marketing regulations

if the people you charge to carry out your telemarketing are not well-trained, highly-skilled and motivated, telemarketing can create a negative image that could damage your business’ reputation

telemarketing has the potential to replace an expensive sales team or part of it and this could lead to negative feelings among employees

training staff to be competent and motivated telemarketers can be time-consuming and costly

you may need to devote some precious in-house time and resources to build databases, prepare scripts, deliver the telephone activity, monitor and manage performance and the adherence to regulations and setup the monitoring and reporting side of your telemarketing programme.

So there you have it, if you can mitigate the disadvantages and focus on deploying Consultative Telemarketing and blend it with your existing digital marketing activities, it can significantly increase sales success.

If you would like to find out more about using and or outsourcing Consultative Telemarketing to enhance the return of your digital marketing strategy, book a call-back or video meeting: https://www.pdtmarketing.co.uk/contact

Phil Gower

Performance Development and Training Limited – The Telemarketing and Lead Generation Experts

phil@pdtmarketing.co.uk

01249 758425

“The team at PDT were instrumental in the making of our new online video marketing campaign. They were sensitive to our audience and brief then creative with their design suggestions, without being overbearing. The filming day was fun and very productive and the post editing result was quickly and efficiently tailored to our requirements. To summarise, we would have no hesitation in recommending you at least contact PDT to discuss your organisations video marketing requirements.”

-Tim Pearce, Owner & Manager